Photo Credit: Marvel Studios
Marvel’s latest decision regarding Avengers: Doomsday is a baffling one.

Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Doomsday is currently in post-production. Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, also known as the Russo Brothers, the movie will be released in United States theaters this December. The sequel, Avengers: Secret Wars, arrives in 2027.

So far, Marvel has released four Avengers: Doomsday teaser trailers. The first teaser revealed that Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers is officially returning to the MCU, while the second focused on Chris Hemsworth’s Thor and the third on a handful of X-Men characters. The fourth teaser put the spotlight on Letitia Wright’s Black Panther/Shuri, Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben Grimm/The Thing, and more. There was also an Avengers: Doomsday trailer shown at CinemaCon last week; however, that footage has not been released online.

What is the strange Avengers: Doomsday decision?

Marvel has announced that Avengers: Endgame is being rereleased this September with some new footage. While that isn’t a terribly surprising decision on Marvel’s part, what has turned some heads is that the new footage will apparently be “critically important” to Avengers: Doomsday’s plot.

If that’s truly the case — and we won’t fully know just how “critical” these new scenes are until we start getting some descriptions of the footage — then the MCU has let fans down over the past seven years. If the culmination of everything that’s happened in the MCU since Endgame is supposed to lead to Doomsday, then having a rerelease of Endgame be such an important part of Avengers 4 undercuts all the other entries that have been part of Phases 4, 5, and 6.

Also, MCU fans have already been complaining about there being too much homework or required viewing when it comes to keeping up with what’s happening in the franchise; now, they’re being asked to go see a rerelease just to see some scenes that’ll tie into a movie they still won’t be able to watch for a month.

While there’s plenty of exciting stuff happening in the MCU, this shows a real failure to build momentum since Endgame; the road to Doomsday could have been much more naturally built, but, instead, we just got one little teaser at the end of The Fantastic Four: First Steps and an Avengers: Endgame release.